Cleverness In Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Do you appreciate what I'm going to call 'cleverness' - wordplay, allusion, non-standard structures, etc. - in pop music? Is it something you look for? Who does it well?

Do you think there's an opposition between cleverness and directness (in emotional or physical impact)? Should pop be cleverer?

(Qn arising from today's Popular entry)

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm already unhappy w/the question by the way - "non-standard structures" is a very broad and vague thing to put under this umbrella!

[damnspynovels.livejournal.com]

surely not really? i mean, define the standard, and then it's anything but.

what's the standard?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Damned if I know! That's why I'm unhappy with it!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the first ppl i thought of when you asked it re 10cc were my lovely ROXY MUSIC -- who i believe will not be trubblin popular for a while yet

and of course it relates to my famous ("famous") question abt nu-prog in ref chart pop c.2002: neo-glam as ragged pop-art collage ect ect

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think it's obvious what kind of music you're talking about though...it's a minefield, when it works it can be amazing (Roisin Murphy, Kate Bush I guess) but if the performer is too DO YOU SEE about it all, it can totally ruin it; and if it's not as clever as it thinks it is it's embarrassing for all concerned. Which is why I thought the layers of meta worked really well on Rachel Stevens' album.

Another reason I'm often suspicious of this is the way it's so often set up as opposition to "non-clever" pop: see Robyn constantly smugly going on about how she wouldn't let her record company turn her into Britney or Xtina, for example. And really, mainstream pop can be just as clever as this stuff - that JoJo line, "you just like the chance to be real" is far more clever and perceptive than anything the ever-so-meta Calvin harris will ever come up with.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well maybe I'm assuming a distinction between clever and intelligent - formalist fun vs content fun I guess.

But for all that I seem to want to fall into this distinction quite easily it seems weak to me - like Frank says, why can't the one be a route to the other? (And the follow-up question - how come it so often isn't?)

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I think the absence of DYS is important to me when thinking abt this, but neither necessary or sufficient. In the extreme case of Kate Bush, it's her total lack of DYS that goes an awful long way to making her 'cleverness' work, yes. She simply seems to not care where the boundaries between standard and non-standard are; if it's interesting to her, she does it, and drags us along with her. Whereas e.g. Bjork is much more self-conscious about what she is doing and that makes her much less compelling to me.

OTOH, we have Roxy Music who def. did have a DYS thing going on, yet it didn't seem to detract from their general aceness and might have actually added to it.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people have one or two of these acts whose cleverness grabs them in exactly the right, sympathetic way, and different angles of possibly related cleverness seem obnoxious.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

An even better example has just come on in Winamp: No Means No, who are ridiculously self-consciously clever-clever, but somehow make up for it by rocking like utter b4stards.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yes. What the different kinds of cleverness are though...

But are there that many non-clever pop acts? I mean, Britney's always come off as dumb in her interviews, but lots of her songs are hella clever. Most of the teenpoppers now are smart. Stefani and Ferg play dumb but are obviously really witty. I think the closest we get to actual really dumb pop is thug rap like 50 Cent, and the ign'ant southern stuff like Dem Franchize Boyz. Which I adore. Maybe this is why I feel like I have to rep so hard for morally reprehensible sex'n'violence hip-hop.

[koganbot]

Sings: "You can stand your non-standard structures under my umbrella."

Quick answer, Yes I appreciate it, No I don't look for it but then I don't look for anything in particular in all songs, No it doesn't have to get in the way of either emotional or physical impact, in fact can be a means to it, all those times Dylan inserted extra lines into verses for mesmerizing rhythmic and emotional effect, e.g. that example I gave in my book from "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll":

Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level

As for allusions, if you know the references this hits like a delirious but dead-accurate karate kick (Dylan again):

I may look like Robert Ford but I feel just like Jesse James

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Under this umbuberella. (I like wordplay sometimes, if Lil' Mama is doing it.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well fvck, I've been beaten to the punchline. That'll show me not to read a thread before posting in it. (Not.)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I find this very difficult to answer BUT if you'd asked me five years ago I would have instantly said YES IT ARE GREAT and showed you my entire collection of David Devant memorabilia. Now I like my pop music to be fun, or gorgeous, or boshingly nasty, or vapidly catchy.

I think my shift in attitude was 50% due to the high saturation of the wrong sort of 'clever' on the London indie circuit 2003-5 where I saw that most people trying to pull off clever a) weren't b) were complete d1cks. The other 50% was that I grew up a bit and realised I wasn't cleverer than the entire world (i.e. I stopped being a student/ex-student and started the rest of my life). Plus, as the Lex says, I can't bear people like Calvin Harris shoving it my face saying 'LOOK IT'S THE 80S DO YOU SEE!!!!' I guess some memes get old very quickly.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Hahahah, yes Devant are exactly everything that doesn't work about 'clever' pop for me.

[koganbot]

Another Dylan example, full of allusions but still a brutal power punch:

Cinderella she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo he's moanin',
"You belong to me, I believe,"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend.
You better leave."
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweepin' up
On Desolation Row

Of course, when aped by hundreds of non-Dylans, stuff like this becomes insufferable.

[koganbot]

You see, the way this works, Cinderella is a poor mistreated step sister so Romeo, who perhaps thinks of himself as romantically warm-hearted, expects her to be easy pickings, to respond immediately to his generous offer of love, or cash, or whatever. (Yeah, I'm projecting that onto the allusions, but that's what allusions are there for.)

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I shall save my detailed personal response to 10cc for the Popular comments box, although in my view they are one band who did 'clever' very well.

I think one big thing in their favour was that the subject matter of their songs was often surprising - and this offset the smartarse wordplay nicely. It took me so long to get my head round the idea that someone would write a song about prison riot-control or plane crashes or blackmail or a revenge-of-the-nerds-style fantasy or voodoo or arms-smuggling or white guys in trouble with the locals in Jamaica or whatever that, by the time I realised I don't know what the right pop vocabulary is for that sort of song, I also realised that 10cc's would do as well as any.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I can sympathise with this. I remember when I was a big Pixies fan I would get very cross with people who preferred Pixies songs about death and lust and the Bible rather than acrostics spelling "Surfer" or space colonisation or Californian settlement patterns or what birds dream about. The latter seemed a lot more enthusiastic and heartfelt to me.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's the motive behind the song that's an important factor. Is the artist desperately trying to impress the listener with how 'clever' they are (Coldplay)? Is this what they would be bibbling on about anyway (Kate Bush)? Is the song completely ridiculous at first glance but in fact it's gone over most people's unclever heads and is actually a work of genius (Fergie)?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have to say that when I think of a band who alienate the listeners with cleverness I wd not pick Coldplay!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

But exactly! They THINK they are being clever which is one of the least clever things one can do as a pop group...

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Heh, the thing with the Pixies was that it never even occurred to me to think of them as a clever band. They were silly and exciting and thrilling and weird and kind of dopey sometimes, but whatever cleverness there was going on didn't register as 'cleverness' at all.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

The one problem with wordplay is that when it fails, my KILL EVERYONE alarm starts to go off. I will never let Aly and AJ off the hook for confusing sums and quotients. I blame the parents. (Parents just don't understand math. <--allusion)

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure why you are so hung up on this one, Dave. I'm sure when I was at school we had "division sums" or that division problems were part of our "sums" lessons.

Perhaps it's different in the States. You do call maths 'math' over there after all ;)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(I like fixating on petty crap to justify making fun of Aly and AJ, I guess. We had lessons about the various names for the result of a given operation -- add/sum, divide/quotient, subtract/difference, multiply/product.)

Are you now or have you ever been a They Might Be Giants fan?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I was for a bit! They were a clever band alright. The key problem with them wasn't their wordplay, it was the way they emphasised the wordplay with a nasal voice and an accordion.

The Magnetic Fields are the They Might Be Giants it's OK to like.

Re: Are you now or have you ever been a They Might Be Giants fan?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

nothing wrong with TMBG. (not that i listened to owt beyond Lincoln/Flood) they play the PROPER SLAPSTICK clown to merrit's 'poster on a teenage girl's wall' pierrot picture clown. clowning takes clever

is there an opposition between cleverness and directness (in emotional or physical impact)?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

This isn't quite answering the intended question, I suspect, but here's an example of a writing partnership where the opposition is frequently set up within the song itself, viz John/Taupin songs of the 70s

The way they work basically is - Bernie writes a lyric, Elton sets it to music. In the early days Elton never knew what he was going to get before it was handed to him, and Bernie didn't often stint on the allusion and metaphor. He was often cryptic to the point of obtuseness in fact. That memorable and moving pop songs were created out of some of these lyrics seems little short of miraculous to me. But equally they wouldn't be half so affecting without the element of impenetrableness.

cleverness zones

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

it all depends on your stance with the source of the cleverness dunnit. one man's clever is another man's pretentious. (so far so obvious). also obv - it takes intense clever to be the best kind of simple and direct. but pop's cleverness might be concentrated in the non-musical marketing stuff. in the styling of a band, the 'stance' of the band. costello and the police pretending to be new wave, the spice girls papier-mache feminism, indie bands blathering authenticity, teenpop or emo 'everyman'. the ones that fool most of the people most of the time, that's clever.

Re: cleverness zones

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking that on the bus - so much 'cleverness' is really in the image the act put across. eg 'Overpowered' isn't really too weird a song, but Roisin's known as a kook and wears a strange dress in the video => it is clever-pop rather than Britney-pop.

G Stefani is fertile territory here b/c something like 'Hollaback Girl' is obv on the face of it as dumb as you get but there's a level of self-awareness there which puts Stefani firmly into clever territory (contra (the (entirely inaccurate) public perception) of Fergie Ferg).

Guess I'm gonna have to tell 'em that I got no cerebellum

[koganbot]

The Ramones own this category.

Should I take a chance on her?
One bullet in the cylinder

A line from the teen-yearning songbook, followed by a gag that takes its razor and reveals an unmendable tear in the teen universe. (A "tear" as in a "rip," though I suppose it can also be a broken teardrop, one that can't be repaired.)

The Kinks, Mothers, Beefheart, Alice Cooper, B-52s, Devo would all be relevant here.

Don't know if this is an example or a counterexample, but Margaret Berger's "Robot Song": seems as if it was conceived as a funny novelty for the pop market, "I'm in love with a robot," the lyrics a lampoon of all those teen songs that say "our parents/our world will not understand our love." Then of course you want to give it a pretty melody, but what happens, incredibly - well, maybe not incredibly, happens in Europop all the time - is that the melody isn't just pretty, it's insanely beautiful and poignant, several aches of beauty beyond "achingly beautiful." So the outer-space effects and robot blips are genuinely haunting, "You're the only one who makes me feel a thing" drifting into an unattainable distance, another place, another time, another world. Almost as moving as the Shangri-Las, the doomed love of "Out In The Streets" and "Leader Of The Pack."

Re: Guess I'm gonna have to tell 'em that I got no cerebellum

[koganbot]

Do the Village People count? (I was thinking of "Robot Song" as coded gay, and then "YMCA" and "In The Navy" popped into my head.)

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

Gosh, this is beginning to make me think of a post about emo I meant to write ages ago. There's a lot of interesting wordplay and shifting perspective in some of the MCR and FOB I've been listening to recently. Some of it is a bit DO YOU SEE. Some of it is quite nice. There's a whole essay in Fall Out Boy's use of "he/him" as a universal antagonist.

Re TMBG/TMF - I add "Fountains of Wayne" to the bottom of that pile.

Re: structure; I'm always noticing odd structure in songs. It's about the single thing left I like in the Fratellis' "Chelsea Dagger": the song is basically verse/bridge/verse/bridge/chorus/chorus. Which is unusual, to say the least.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

LOL! Creme
MAO! Godley

(sorry, it felt inevitable)

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

I wuv the clever, and indeed the "clever", very very much. It can totally turn off all other quality criteria for me when in effect.

Actually I recall using the exact words "clever = brilliant" in an old ilm post about The Divine Comedy's "If", which has clever wordplay going on on different timescales: the bit that was quoted in reviews etc was the couplet "If you were attacked, I would kill for you / If your name was Jack, I'd change mine to Jill for you" -- lovely doublerhyme -- while the thing that floored me were the lines "If you were a dog, I'd feed you scraps from off the table" & "If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable", which also has lovely doublerhyme, yet appear in different verses!

It's probably connected to my love of puzzles, quizzes, cryptics etc; the discovery of a hidden something buried by the artist (which can happen by eg musical allusion as well as wordplay) giving me a hit of pleasure -- and I must admit that this pleasure is totally selfcongratulatory in the "ooh amn't I clever too!" way.

Kinda related: There was another old ilm thread about The Monochrome Set, where (if I remember correctly) Tom said that a thing which hindered him from getting into them was that they were "too droll" -- which actually led to me checking them out further. I suppose one could approximate the connection by droll : clever :: delivery : content? I also think that the "droll" dimension is the one that has really been ruined the most by bad britpop rather than the "clever", though it is not always easy to distinguish them from each other.

Also, erm, Carter USM.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

There should be a thread about "stupidity in pop" sometime - is there an appreciation of this?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Yes. As with all genres sometimes pop does not need to think, however, since clever and stupid are subjective and often bear no relation to an artist's original intentions, I think they're both difficult things to assess. [ie: the Fast Food Rockers may have thought the whole thing was a hilarious and clever joke, which it wasn't and in contrast, Alisha's Attic probably reckoned 'Alisha Rules The World' was just a pretty good song, whereas I think it's fvcking genius etc.]

Err, that made no sense now I read over it. Nevermind.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

See, I think that Fast Food Rockers song might have been aiming (apart from trying to making a good song out of it) for a stupidity that actually pays attention to what's clever in pop - so as to reverse it. The joke wears out but whenever I hear it I like it well enough.

Pop thinks all the time, as everything else, just that the thoughts may not be 'profound', but again many things that might be thought as profound aren't at all.

Don't worry about not making sense, there is actually quite a lot to unpack - and not time, as usual.